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Distinctly Digital: Subjectivity and Recognition in Teenage Girls' Online Self-Presentations

Brown, Adriane J.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306518667

Abstract Details

2011, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Womens Studies.
This dissertation examines the ways that teenage girls’ online interactions reflect their psychic and social struggles to negotiate contradictory and constricting discourses regarding contemporary American girlhood. Literature on girls’ online interactions has tended to fall into one of two categories. In the first, scholars sound alarms about the ubiquity of risk in digital spaces (for instance, on websites that supposedly promote eating disorders). In the second, scholars celebrate the ways that teenagers engage in social activism online. In contrast, I argue that emergent media scholarship often fails to question the messages of autonomous selfhood that characterize girls’ digital personas. I utilize feminist and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity to suggest that girls’ voices and agencies are always embedded in normative ideals of gender, race, sexuality, and class. I examine a variety of digital spaces that cover a diverse range of contemporary American girlhoods, including queer girls’ MySpace pages, pro-bulimia message boards, and fan sites for young musicians such as Taylor Swift. I utilize a three-pronged methodology: analysis of the textual and visual elements of websites, instant messenger interviews with girls, and a research blog that explains my project to my research subjects in understandable language. Website analysis and interviews reveal that girls feel personally empowered by the ability to express themselves and demonstrate “who they really are” online in ways they cannot offline, but their digital personas are deeply embedded in discourses that privilege normative femininity, whiteness, heterosexuality, thinness, and middle-class status as conditions to aspire to. This research shows that despite girls’ proclamations about articulating independent selves online, their self-presentations are consciously and unconsciously motivated by a yearning for recognition by real and fantasy online audiences. Elucidating girls’ desire for recognition illustrates the limited range of possible subjectivities to girls under post-feminism and hegemonic white consumption ideals. My dissertation thus points to the inadequacy of media scholars’ reliance on teenage girls’ explicit statements about their intentions for their online personas, demonstrating the importance of a psychoanalytic perspective to reveal the ways that allusive and unspoken desires—especially the subject’s fundamental longing for recognition—underpin girls’ digital self-presentations.
Mary Thomas, PhD (Advisor)
Jill Bystydzienski, PhD (Committee Member)
Linda Mizejewski, PhD (Committee Member)
Julia Watson, PhD (Committee Member)
291 p.
Gender Studies; Womens Studies
girlhood; digital media; subjectivity; recognition; whiteness; psychoanalysis; Butler; girls

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Brown, A. J. (2011). Distinctly Digital: Subjectivity and Recognition in Teenage Girls' Online Self-Presentations [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306518667

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Brown, Adriane. Distinctly Digital: Subjectivity and Recognition in Teenage Girls' Online Self-Presentations. 2011. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306518667.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Brown, Adriane. "Distinctly Digital: Subjectivity and Recognition in Teenage Girls' Online Self-Presentations." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306518667

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1306518667
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© 2011, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.